Home is Where My Hole is…

or~  Blog Banter 39: Home

"Some say a man's home is his castle. For others it is wherever they lay their hat. The concept is just as nebulous in the New Eden sandbox.

“In EVE Online, what does the concept of "home" mean to you?"

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Mal said it best…

“Love. You can learn all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air that you don't love, she'll shake you off just as sure as the turning of the worlds. Love keeps her in the air when she oughta fall down, tells you she's hurtin' 'fore she keens. Makes her a home.”

When I first came to EVE I came to the game mostly as an EVEborn but in thinking back on it, and after reading Space Noob’s experiences, I realize I did have a little bit of the goonborn thing working for me in that I already had people I knew I could trust here. My son and a good friend had been ingame a year and on my first day they, (1) staked me 10M ISK and (b) told me to go away and “DO ALL THE TUTORIALS”… so I did. It was good advice and I avoided some of the pitfalls Space Noob ran into by skipping them a bit and then finding out that I really did need to do them first. But, that was as far as they went in assisting me.

After my wallet flashed and I was told to bugger off… I was left on my own. They and I realized I was better off exploring and learning for myself. You can tell a child over and over “The stove is HOT!”, but they never really learn it until they get burned that first time…

So, there I was in Republic Military School at Hadaugago, in Heimatar. I ran the tutorials and finally was pointed to Sister Alitura’s L1 “Epic Arc” at Arnon in Essence. After completing the Arc I… well... I was in that weird ‘OK, I’m done with school, now what?’ stage. I wasn’t really interested in and I didn’t feel I was ready to join a corp… But what can you do solo in EVE as a fresh-outta-skool-noob? Hmmm… what can one do in EVE?

Running the tutorials I had found that I wasn’t at ALL interested in industry or freighter work, I knew I liked shooting shit but I did not have access to missions above L2s and I didn’t wanna trust just any ol’ toon in a fleet to join in higher level mishes (I’d seen Socratic and his ilk gank enough noobs to have learned that lesson without having to go thru it personally…) (and if ya wanna good laugh read “The Socratic Files” by Zedric Cayne) so I knew I wasn’t ready for PvP… (I didn’t know about RvB then) So, I chose to solo rat the belts in 0.5 systems in and around Arnon. As a noob it made me some steady even if not a ‘lot’ of ISK. But it was a helluvalotta fun, I got to travel around a lot and see things and have adventures… and it filled the time while I skilled up through the classes of ships to Battlecruiser.

It was around then that my RL guys and I decided to create HBHI. Schweet! Then we decided on a HQ system based on agent availability and… it wasn’t Arnon… huh. I suddenly realized I did not want to leave Arnon. It had, at some point without me even realizing it, become my home.

Home. My home in space. I have spoke of this afore but at the end of a day’s ratting I would often undock and position my ship right at the top edge of the undock at the SOE station in Arnon and just sit… dangling my legs, sipping a drink and watch the parade of fools and noobs and gankers and griefers and mission runners and the whole panalopy of EVE unfold… I called it ‘sittin on the porch’, and it was just like sittin on the porch of any summer EVEning and watching the goings on of your neighbors and passersby…

I realized even then, that this was a special time for me. While I was getting to where I had some skills and had learned some of the pitfalls and such, it was all still ‘new’ to me, and it all still held that sense of wonder and awe one has at the beginning of a great adventure.

But, change is the one universal constant in the ‘verse, Real or Virtual, and so we moved to Soshin in The Forge. Where we had a few others join our little band, where we joined our first Alliance and had our first War.

Then came the BIG THING for HBHI. We discovered Wormholes. The Alliance had a POS in a C1 and access to a POS in a C2 via a member corp and once we were all trained up we had ALL decided Wormhole Space was the Place we needa be!! So we loaded up the Mammoths and we moved to Dodixie… (well… “…we moved to the C2” just doesn’t have the Beverly Hillbilly’s ‘ring’ to it now does it?) and we did sorta base outta Dodi when we were in Empire anyway.

But… when the Forcefield first went up on our very own Planetary Orbital Station, HBHI had its very first, bought and paid for, HOME. This was a very ‘real’ (in the virtual sense) home of our own to us. We Paid for it. We OWN it. We make or buy the fuels to keep it running. It is OURS.

The first wormhole we lived in belonged to an Allied corp, we were not ‘renters’ we were welcome guest and friends but it was not ‘our’ hole, not our Etherestate. This was never a negative and we were very comfortable and happy in the C2.

Once I wanted to jump corp and try my hand at being a pirate and a War Dec’er… and I found that no matter where I was in New Eden no matter how attached I was to a certain sky, HBHI was in fact also my home. HBHI is my family in EVE… I even blogged about my feelings at the time when I first jumped corp here.

Then we tried null… personally yuch, nough said.

Now we are setup in a C3 wormhole that ‘we’, HBHI, own and we are back living in “Serenity Station”, our POS. This is our home in our homehole.

“Home”. It is that place where your family and friends are. It is where you are accepted for who you are, warts and bad temper and all. It is the place you can keep your stuff and feel safe (by this I mean as long as ‘we’ keep the FF up and we keep our security tight, anything we have inside the POS FF is almost as safe as in an NPC station…). But best of all it is ours. And it is up to us to keep it safe… same as in RL. This is what “home” means to me… in RL as well as in EVE.

Often when I am on alone the day is done I will just sit and gaze at our home in the stars… as The Operative (sorta) put it…

“Have you looked at… …his face? It's love, in point of fact. Something a good deal more dangerous.”

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky  =/|)=

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